Far, wide and cool

Salvage the air-con: Beijing workers remove an air conditioner from a building to be demolished

Peter Parks · AFP · Getty

The US is no longer the key player in the future of air conditioning. Although US energy consumption for it continues to rise as homes get bigger and the climate warms, sales of units are stagnant; households make do with replacing old ones. New customers are appearing in emerging countries as an urban middle class develops. In China air-con has arrived in all large cities; over 200m units were sold there between 2010 and 2016. By 2020, Stan Cox estimates, China may have more air conditioners than the US (1).

India remains relatively under-provisioned (2-3% of homes), but the potential is huge. India has sprawling cities and hot, humid summers; during 2015’s exceptional heatwaves the temperature reached a record 51°C in Bhubaneswar. And for India’s middle class, cool air is no longer unaffordable; for around a decade air-con sales leapt by 15-20% a year. In 2013-4, 3.3m units were sold (2). Air-con is so desirable some car ads make more of this feature than acceleration. Every summer the increased demand for electricity that it causes severely strains the grid. Power cuts are common and giant outages sometimes occur, as in July 2012, when 600 million people were cut off.

Air-con is well established in Japan, South Korea and the Gulf states, where people ski in shopping malls while it’s 40°C outside. The market is also developing strongly in Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines and Mexico. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s projections, 700m units may be sold between now and 2030, and 1.6bn by 2050 (3). Global air-con penetration would then reach US levels, in the same vicious circle: air-con exacerbates global warming, which stimulates greater use.

Benoît Bréville

Member of Le Monde diplomatique’s editorial team

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(1) Stan Cox, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (And finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer),The New Press, New York, 2010.